Yaztromo

@Yaztromo@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of manufacturer-agnostic smart home devices out there, and with just a tiny bit of research online it’s not difficult to avoid anything that is overly tied to a cloud service. Z-wave, ZigBee, Thread/Matter devices are all locally controlled and don’t require a specific companies app or environment — it’s only really the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel WiFi based devices that rely on cloud services that you have to be careful of. As with anything, you get what you pay for.

  Even if the Internet were destroyed tomorrow, my smart door locks would continue to function — not only are they Z-wave based (so local control using a documented protocol which has Open Source drivers available), but they work even if not “connected”. I can even add new door codes via the touchscreen interface if I wanted to.

  The garage door scenario can be a bit more tricky, as there aren’t a lot of good “open” options out there. However, AFAIK all of them continue to work as a traditional garage door opener if the online service becomes unavailable. I have a smart Liftmaster garage door opener (which came with the house when we bought it), and while it’s manufacturer has done some shenanigans in regards to their API to force everyone to use their app (which doesn’t integrate with anything), it still works as a traditional non-smart garage door opener. The button in the garage still works, as does the remote on the outside of the garage, the remotes it came with, and the Homelink integration in both of our vehicles.

  With my IONIQ 5, the online features while nice are mostly just a bonus. The car still drives without them, the climate control still works without being online — most of what I lose are “nice-to-have” features like remote door lock/unlock, live weather forecasts, calendar integration, and remote climate control. But it isn’t as if the car stops being drivable if the online service goes down. And besides which, so long as CarPlay and Android Auto are supported, I can always rely on them instead for many of the same functions.

  Some cars have much more integration than mine — and the loss of those services may be more annoying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To what extent, if at all, would have CrowdStrike's faulty update have been made easier to deal with with an immutable distro?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  …until the CrowdStrike agent updated, and you wind up dead in the water again.

  The whole point of CrowdStrike is to be able to detect and prevent security vulnerabilities, including zero-days. As such, they can release updates multiple times per day. Rebooting in a known-safe state is great, but unless you follow that up with disabling the agent from redownloading the sensor configuration update again, you’re just going to wing up in a BSOD loop.

  A better architectural solution like would have been to have Windows drivers run in Ring 1, giving the kernel the ability to isolate those that are misbehaving. But that risks a small decrease in performance, and Microsoft didn’t want that, so we’re stuck with a Ring 0/Ring 3 only architecture in Windows that can cause issues like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some bad code just broke a billion Windows machines⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That company had the power to destroy our businesses, cripple travel and medicine and our courts, and delay daily work that could include some timely and critical tasks.

  Unless you have the ability and capacity to develop your own ISA/CPU architecture, firmware, OS, and every tool you use from the ground up, you will always be, at some point, “relying on others stuff” which can break on you at a moments notice.

  That could be Intel, or Microsoft, or OpenSSH, or CrowdStrike^0. Very, very, very few organizations can exist in the modern computing world without relying on others code/hardware (with the main two that could that come to mind outside smaller embedded systems being IBM and Apple).

  I do wish that consumers had held Microsoft more to account over the last few decades to properly use the Intel Protection Rings (if the CrowdStrike driver were able to run in Ring 1, then it’s possible the OS could have isolated it and prevented a BSOD, but instead it runs in Ring 0 with the kernel and has access to damage anything and everything) — but that horse appears to be long out of the gate (enough so that X86S proposes only having Ring 0 and Ring 3 for future processors).

  But back to my basic thesis: saying “it’s your fault for relying on other peoples code” is unhelpful and overly reductive, as in the modern day it’s virtually impossible to do so. Even fully auditing your stacks is prohibitive. There is a good argument to be made about not living in a compute monoculture^1; and lots of good arguments against ever using Windows^2 (especially in the cloud) — but those aren’t the arguments you’re making. Saying “this is your fault for relying on other peoples stuff” is unhelpful — and I somehow doubt you designed your own ISA, CPU architecture, firmware, OS, network stack, and application code to post your comment.

  ——- ^0 — Indeed, all four of these organizations/projects have let us down like this; Intel with Spectre/Meltdown, Microsoft with the 28 day 32-bit Windows reboot bug, and OpenSSH just announced regreSSHion.
  ^1 — My organization was hit by the Falcon Sensor outage — our app tier layers running on Linux and developer machines running on macOS were unaffected, but our DBMS is still a legacy MS SQL box, so the outage hammered our stack pretty badly. We’ve fortunately been well funded to remove our dependency on MS SQL (and Windows in general), but that’s a multi-year effort that won’t pay off for some time yet.
  ^2 — my Windows hate is well documented elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I certainly wouldn’t run to HR right away — but unfortunately, it’s true sometimes that people just aren’t a good fit for whatever reason. Deadweight that isn’t able to accomplish the tasks that need to be done doesn’t do you any favours — if you’re doing your job and their jobs because they just can’t handle the tasks that’s hardly fair to you, and isn’t doing the organization any good — eventually you’ll burn out, nobody will pickup the slack, and everyone will suffer for it.

  My first instinct in your situation however would be that everyone has got used to the status quo, including the staff you have to constantly mentor. Hopefully if you can coach them into doing the work for themselves and keeping them accountable to tasks and completion dates will help change the dynamic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a tech manager with a 100% remote team of seven employees. We’re a very high performing team overall, and I give minimal hand-holding while still fostering a collaborative working environment.

  First off, you need to make outcomes clear. Assign tasks, and expect them to get done in a reasonable timeframe. But beyond that, there should be no reason to micro-manage actual working hours. If some developer needs some time during the day to run an errand and wants to catch up in the evening, fine by me. I don’t need them to be glued to their desk 9-5/10-6 or for some set part of the day — so long as the tasks are getting done in reasonable time, I let me employees structure their working hours as they see fit.

  Three times a week we have regular whole-team checkins (MWF), where everyone can give a status update on their tasks. This helps keep up accountability.

  Once a month I reserve an hour for each employee to just have a general sync-up. I allow the employee to guide how this time is used — whether they want to talk about issues with outstanding tasks, problems they’re encountering, their personal lives, or just “shoot the shit”. I generally keep these meetings light and employee-directed, and it gives me a chance to stay connected with them on both a social level and understand what challenges they might be facing.

  And that’s it. I’ve actually gone as far as having certain employees who were being threatened with back-to-office mandates to have them converted to “remote employee” in the HR database so they’d have to lay off threatening them — only 2 of my 7 employees are even in the same general area of the globe (my employees are spread in 3 different countries at the moment), and I don’t live somewhere with an office, so having some employees forced to report to an office doesn’t help me in the slightest (I can’t be in 6 places at once — I live far enough away I can’t be in any of those places on a regular basis!).

  Your employees may have got used to you micro-managing them. Changing this won’t happen overnight. Change from a micro-manager into a coach, and set them free. And if they fail…then it’s time to talk to HR and to see about making some changes. HTH!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft and IBM make MS-DOS 4.00 Open-Source⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure what’s keeping Microsoft and ibm from Open Sourcing all the rest of the DOS versions as well — the 3.x series was very influential, 5 added disk compression, and 6 was the most modern of them all. I can’t remember if Stac’s lawsuit against Microsoft would require them to take out the disk compression parts (although AFAIK the relevant patents are probably long expired now), but even if that’s the case having these available as OSS would also be useful — even if only for a historical context.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft and IBM make MS-DOS 4.00 Open-Source⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To put things into context, IBM didn’t get ripped off in any way (at least not from DOS - the whole IBM/Microsoft OS/2 debacle is a different story). The earliest PCs (IBM PC, IBM PC XT, IBM PC Jr., and associated clones) didn’t really have the hardware capabilities needed to permit a more advanced operating system. There was no flat memory model, no protection rings, and no Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). The low maximum unpaged memory addressing limit (1MB) made it difficult to run more than one process at a time, and really limits how much OS you can have active on the machine (modern Windows by way of example reserves 1GB of virtual RAM per process just for kernel memory mapping).

  These things did exist on mainframe and mini computers of the day — so the ideas and techniques weren’t unknown — but the cheaper IBM PCs had so many limitations that those techniques were mostly detrimental (there were some pre-emptive OSs for 8086/8088 based PCs, but they had a lot of limitations, particularly around memory management and protection), if not outright impossible. Hence the popularity of DOS in its day — it was simple, cheap, didn’t require a lot of resources, and mostly stayed out of the way of application development. It worked reasonably well given the limitations of the platforms it ran on, and the expectations of users.

  So IBM did just fine from that deal — it was when they went in with Microsoft to replace DOS with a new OS that did feature pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and other modern techniques that they got royally screwed over by Microsoft (vis: the history of OS/2 development).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft and IBM make MS-DOS 4.00 Open-Source⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone who has done some OS dev, it’s not likely to be of much help. DOS didn’t have much of any of the defining features of most modern OS’s — it barely had a kernel, there was no multitasking, no memory management, no memory protection, no networking, and everything ran at the same privilege level. What little bit of an API was there was purely through a handful of software interrupts — otherwise, it was up to your code to communicate with nearly all the hardware directly (or to communicate with whatever bespoke device driver your hardware required).

  This is great for anyone that wants to provide old-school DOS compatibility, and could be useful in the far future to aid in “digital archaeology” (i.e.: being able to run old 80’s and early 90’s software for research and archival purposes on “real DOS”) — but that’s about it. DOS wasn’t even all that modern for its time — we have much better tools to use and learn from for designing OS’s today.

  As a sort of historical perspective this is useful, but not likely for anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AWS already had to effectively do this. AWS only exists in two regions in China because they licensed much of the AWS software to be run by a pair of Chinese-government affiliated ISPs inside China (that is, Amazon doesn’t run AWS in either of its China zones — it’s run by a pair of Chinese companies who license AWS’s software).

  This is why the China AWS regions are often quite far behind in terms of functionality from every other region (they either haven’t licensed all the functionality, they don’t keep up-to-date at the same cadence as Amazon, or Amazon is holding certain functions back), and why you can’t really access them from the standard AWS console.

  So in effect, Amazon did have to give their software to Chinese-government affiliated companies in order to continue operating in China.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fisker now expects to go bankrupt within 30 days⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Likely well deserved — but still unfortunate. The EV space only benefits from more options and more competition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MKBHD - Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  An honest review isn’t what’s going to kill their business. Even a bad product in and of itself isn’t necessarily what could cause the death of their business — it’s their not adequately tempering consumer expectations. From the sounds of it, they’ve oversold what the product can actually do, and are charging a price based on this fantasy.

  If you’re honest in your marketing as to what your product can actually do, and charge a corresponding price then consumers and reviewers may be more forgiving. Where companies like this one which are doing fairly experimental stuff fail is when they over-promise and under-deliver. And reviewers will always take them to task when they do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Image for a moment how we Computer Scientists feel. We invented the most brilliant tools humanity has ever conceived of, bringing the entire world to nearly anyone’s fingertips — and people use it to design and perpetuate pathetic brain-rot garbage like Gab.ai and anti-science conspiracy theories.

  Fucking Eternal September…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Got a T-Mobile eSIM while travelling in the US last year to get around this. The eSIM was a great deal (can’t remember the specifics, but pretty cheap with a decent amount of data). I was making two trips to California and Georgia in the same 30 day window, so it was useful to have.

  The only downside was that I couldn’t activate the eSIM before getting to the US, and LAX didn’t appear to have any WiFi while we were there (not sure if that was generally true for the time, or if it was just offline). So I wound up having to roam to get the eSIM, and to get a text message from the shuttle that was picking us up from the airport (as I had to give them that in advance, and didn’t know what my US number would be until I got there).

  Still saved us some money, but it was a bit of a PITA to activate with no WiFi available at the airport.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My experience modding r/Canning burnt me out on online canning forums. There is a ton of unsafe information out there, and so I just got out of online canning discussions altogether.

  There was a Lemmy instance out there that was intended to revolve around self sufficiency that offered me moderation rights to their canning forum, but that instance didn’t really take off, nobody ever posted to their canning community, and the instance went offline several months ago.

  I still can — but I don’t participate in any online canning communities, so I’m not sure what’s trustworthy out there right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Canadian here as well, and no — we can’t participate. Not that it hasn’t stopped them from contacting me several times anyway.

  Unfortunately, even if this IPO crashes and burns the real villains in this story are going to make it out with millions in their pockets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, you may have seen some of my posts from the time on r/Save3rdPartyApps and/or r/ModCoord. I was one of the few pretty vocal that we had to hold the line, and that a simple two week blackout wasn’t going to be effective. I knew they’d either be forced to capitulate or kick me out as the head moderator or r/Canning — and wasn’t surprised after most of the other mods chickened out that they did just that.

  I wasn’t about to chicken out — the worst they could do is remove from me the privilege of working for them for free. My entire personality and self-worth wasn’t tied to being a Reddit moderator.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m still technically a moderator elsewhere, but I haven’t been active since June (no posts, no moderation, no messages). It’s an artifact of being one of the approved contributors on r/AskScience — they delegate a controlled set of moderator powers to anyone in their Panel Plus programme.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re not the first to have noted that — but it remains funny, so we’re good 🤣.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So they voted ‘neigh’?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They kicked myself and my entire mod team from r/Canning because we held a vote and our users asked us to shut the community down in protest of their 3rd party app policies.

  Then recently they emailed and messaged me telling me I could get in on the ground floor of buying shares.

  That’s going to be a big resounding “no” from me there u/spez.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨105 Trillion Pi Digits: The Journey to a New Pi Calculation Record⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re already past the point where calculating more digits of pi is either interesting or useful. The formula for calculating pi is well known, so at this point all it is is how much compute power and time can you throw at the infinite series equation.

  Pi is only useful for practical purposes out to around 21 digits — with that many digits you can calculate the diameter of the entire universe down to an accuracy of a single electron. Anything more has no real practical benefits. Even NASA only uses 16 digits of Pi for any calculation in-solar system; anything more is just burning compute power (and possibly running into issues with floating point rounding issues) for no additional benefit.

  Ten years from now when computers are significantly more powerful, someone will break this record for the lulz.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CFCs⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).

  That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.

  Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Chuck E Cheese a restaurant or entertainment center with a restaurant inside?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Chuck E Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell — the same Nolan Bushnell who was one of the co-founders of video game company Atari (at one time, the biggest player in the home console industry). He started it in part as a way to promote Atari games and cabinets.

  So it was both — and the “entertainment centre” part was always part of its “core mission” from its inception.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Wants To Kill PWAs⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Arbitrarily and suddenly destroying all apps built with a certain tech stack…

  Except they aren’t. Sure, PWAs may be slightly more disadvantaged on iOS/iPadOS than they are now, but they haven’t been “destroyed”. And they continue to work exactly as they did with the prior iOS/iPadOS release in all the rest of the world.

  Everyone seems to think Apple is playing some sort of 4D Chess to kill off PWAs — but if Apple wanted to kill off PWAs they could just disable the functionality completely globally tomorrow, and they’d likely face no repercussions for doing so. They don’t even need an excuse to do so.

  I’m not claiming that Apple is acting honourably here; merely that if they actually wanted to kill PWAs it wouldn’t require some sort of Rube Goldberg machine-style planning to do it. There is no conspiracy here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Wants To Kill PWAs⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The title appears to be quite the reach. If Apple wanted to kill PWA’s, they would have done so worldwide. There is absolutely nothing preventing them from disabling them in the US and Canada (and much of the rest of the world) today, but they haven’t — they’re only disabling them in the EU.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points | Big Blue staffers aren’t pleased to lose out on potential bonuses⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been 25 years for me, so fortunately the patents have all expired (technically it was more than 2 because of publication in a few different countries, but it was for two inventions). However, during the time when they were all still valid I always had to tread a fine line with other employers — one the one hand, of course they’re on my resume (and LinkedIn profile). But on the other, if they knew about the contents of the inventions and someone in our organization ran afoul of them, they at least needed some plausible deniability that they didn’t know about the contents of the inventions. And for at least one of them, I always feared if they knew about it they might be tempted to try to use it, and be driven insane by the knowledge that if they did, IBM could sue them into the ground 🤣.

  I did have a pre-existing Open Source project from prior to working at IBM which I ensured was adequately documented prior to my employment. It was eventually forked and became an IBM alphaWorks project — I never got any money for it (they offered, but it was a pathetic amount for losing all rights to my own pre-existing code that took years of effort), and after leaving IBM had to go back to working on the original pre-IBM codebase.

  Overall, my experience at IBM as an inventor/innovator wasn’t great, but was better than most other organizations I’ve worked for since. Honestly, I wish we could just remove software patents altogether, making IBM’s move here moot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points | Big Blue staffers aren’t pleased to lose out on potential bonuses⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.

  At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.

  The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.

  At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electric School Buses More Than Doubled In USA From March 2022 To June 2023⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My daughters school (in Canada) uses several. They’re not only quiet, but they’re not spewing gas/diesel fumes where kids are standing around when loading, especially in the winter. They’re not at 100% electrification yet, but they appear to have around 50% of the busses as EVs.

  Nice for the local residents too, as they’re much quieter running and up down the residential streets around the school.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While I still think that Hyundai engineering and design did some real magic with the IONIQ 5, I just can’t help but feel like the rest of the company is just screwing the pooch on this car. They’ve flooded the US market with models people there don’t seem to want to buy, and dealership lots often have a dozen or more waiting to be sold.

  Meanwhile, here in Canada buying one is damn near impossible. That doesn’t seem to stop them from sending out mass marketing materials and ads trying to sell them (or the IONIQ 6), mind you — I just wish they had focussed first on ensuring their biggest boosters globally were getting the cars they want, as opposed to putting lots of cars nobody seems to want on US dealership lots.

  (FWIW, my dealership told me they weren’t being allowed by Hyundai to order any 2023 IONIQ 5s. This seems to be a fairly common occurrence across all dealerships here in Canada, with just a few cars trickling in each month).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Meanwhile, up here in Canada I put a down payment on an IONIQ 5 Ultimate Edition (Canadian equivalent of the US ‘Limited’ model) back in early April 2022, and it still hasn’t been ordered, because Hyundai decided to flood the US market while stiffing the Canadian market.

  Hyundai (and other EV makers) are fucking around, and then blaming the market.